Workshop for a group of women and men aged between 80 and 100, with advancing fo age they begin to perceive physical and cognitive, decline. The goal is to promote psychological andphysical well-being.
Participants experience their body in positive and pleasant way through movement (the one possible for each one), games, contact and listening to their feelings. Listening to the body and comunicating through non-verbal channels can promote the expression of personal experiences, restart vital energies, provide a sense of both physical and mental well-being, create or strengthen interpersonal relationships.
The stereotype of common opinion considers the elderly as naturally inclined to withdraw into oneself and not very inclined to new experiences. However, we begin to consider the third and fourth age as useful times to experience new freedom, psychological growth and the pleasant aspects of prolonged existence; and, among the various suggested activities, mooving the body with awareness is fundamental. Life is movement … And when movement is blocked or requires a great physical effort, also social life limits, the horizon of interests is reduced, attention is limited to people, things and nearby events, reachable.
This new activity is for lucid or confused people with medium-mild deterioration. It provides a first brief moment of dialogue on how the week went, which is followed by the actual psychomotor activity with various proposals. What all the proposals have in common is the dimension of play, movement, personal expression and the relationship with the members of the group. In some moments the activity is accompanied by music. I am careful to capture the reactions of the guests in order to suppor tthem. Psychomotor skills also promote spontaneous play, because it’s full of surprises and meanings. The activity ends with a brief moment of verbalization, in which participants are invited to say how they felt.
I had this idea after having participating to an international conference in 2016 and the following year to an international seminar in which Prof. Juan Mila Demarchi, Specialized in Gerontopsychomotricity, Director of Primer Infancia, National Directorate of Education was present. At that time I was looking after my 88-year-old father, suffering from Alzheimer’s, who initially lived in Milan. Later on we took him to San Benedetto where I lived with my son and we organized his new life with my brothers. I experienced and discovered with him, especially in the last months of his life, a new world in which I saw him happy and more lucid by all the family “therapies”, the “workshops”, the psychomotor games that I offered him with the complicity of care givers, my kids, brother and sister. I wanted to welcome another 5/6 of his peers with similar disorders with their caregivers. Unfortunately he passed away before I could start the project. 15 months after his death, I started offering workshops to elderly people.
Many of them have been able to experience their bodies.